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But, admitting this one soul at every point, how is there a
particular soul of the individual and how the good soul and the
bad?
The one soul reaches to the individual but nonetheless contains
all souls and all intelligences; this, because it is at once a
unity and an infinity; it holds all its content as one yet with
each item distinct, though not to the point of separation. Except
by thus holding all its content as one-life entire, soul entire,
all intelligence- it could not be infinite; since the
individualities are not fenced off from each other, it remains
still one thing. It was to hold life not single but infinite and
yet one life, one in the sense not of an aggregate built up but
of the retention of the unity in which all rose. Strictly, of
course, it is a matter not of the rising of the individuals but
of their being eternally what they are; in that order, as there
is no beginning, so there is no apportioning except as an
interpretation by the recipient. What is of that realm is the
ancient and primal; the relation to it of the thing of process
must be that of approach and apparent merging with always
dependence.
But we ourselves, what are We?
Are we that higher or the participant newcomer, the thing of
beginnings in time?
Before we had our becoming Here we existed There, men other than
now, some of us gods: we were pure souls, Intelligence inbound
with the entire of reality, members of the Intellectual, not
fenced off, not cut away, integral to that All. Even now, it is
true, we are not put apart; but upon that primal Man there has
intruded another, a man seeking to come into being and finding us
there, for we were not outside of the universe. This other has
wound himself about us, foisting himself upon the Man that each
of us was at first. Then it was as if one voice sounded, one word
was uttered, and from every side an ear attended and received and
there was an effective hearing, possessed through and through of
what was present and active upon it: now we have lost that first
simplicity; we are become the dual thing, sometimes indeed no
more than that later foisting, with the primal nature dormant and
in a sense no longer present.
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